by Kevin Harris
In the time of rationing many items were prohibited. What affected us most was the restriction on anything pear-shaped. It was a fearful time, people became desperate and unpredictable in their behaviours if they did not have something pear-shaped around them. Pear-shaped beer mats became collectors’ items for the fearless. If you had pear-shaped foam on your coffee you could be in trouble. There were plain-clothed inspectors with dodgy eyes, going from café to bar dipping unambiguously oblong biscotti in their espressos, and measuring muffins and panini with shiny calipers and detailed trigonometric formulae. The shape had been defined, the margins were strict, the authorities emphatic, the punishment severe. My neighbour had to cut down an apple tree, for fear that a single deformation among the fruit would result in torture. Much heart-shaped jewellery was shallow-buried in gardens, the right way up. If something went pear-shaped from some previous, perhaps nebulous shape—a haircut for instance—you might have to stay indoors for a few days. But when it came to nebulous forms, identifying a pear-shaped cloud became an undercover pastime with its own coded vocabulary, whispered around the city, and people would look up with serious expressions of knowing innocence.
Toilet seats and eggs were exempt. That was a relief, although none of us has ever seen a pear-shaped egg, and hope not to. Otherwise, if you wanted pear-shaped shoes, say, or pear-shaped cushions, you had to know someone. Or you had to know someone who knew someone, which amounts to the same thing. I remember feeling the most profound envy on being shown a pear-shaped frying pan, an emotion so powerful that I even considered denouncing the friend of a friend of a slight and inconsequential acquaintance, in whose kitchen it was displayed with smug hauteur. Defiantly, the rebellious among us baked pear-shaped biscuits and fried pear-shaped potato cakes, hastily gobbled. Some drew upside-down hearts on their walls with lipstick. I draped an old bicycle tyre-tube, gracefully pleated at the base, the valve proudly atop, around my bathroom mirror.
And so it became apparent, that which had not been apparent before, how fundamental this shape is to psychological contentment. There is a profound human need for this image, often so rudely maligned, in our everyday environment—in two dimensions or three. We who previously had not recognised its significance, rapidly came to crave sight of the shape of the pear from the day it was prohibited. We experienced an irrepressible compulsion to generate examples of the form around us, and those who could not compensate for its absence fell ill or became deranged. There is undoubtedly something reassuring and affirming in its combination of symmetry on the vertical plane, but not on the horizontal. This is why a pear on its side seems not to be pear-shaped. In its iconic upright stance, however, the blending of symmetry and asymmetry is almost worthy of worship. Here is tradition and innovation combined, stability and adventure, reason and emotion, Apollo and Dionysius—all in an organic package whose ripeness is notoriously unpredictable, so easily neglected, a metaphor if ever there was one. And a universally-recognisable profile in which, we can be sure, every pear ever grown has been unique in shape.

Kevin Armor Harris lives in England. When not being ritually exhausted by grandchildren he writes short fiction and prose poems, characterised by a combination of quirky humour and a readiness to disturb and surprise. His work is beginning to appear in sources such as Dream Catcher, Short Fiction, and Flash Fiction North.